Kana, a San Francisco-based agentic marketing platform, has raised $15M in seed funding led by Mayfield. The company deploys AI agents to construct high-precision audiences, secure brand visibility across AI answer engines, deliver real-time analytics, optimize campaigns, generate synthetic data, and boost acquisition, growth, and retention for marketers. The capital will accelerate platform development and go-to-market efforts post-stealth.
Agentic AI Breaks Martech Silos
The timing aligns with surging interest in AI-powered marketing tools as search shifts to answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity. Founders' prior ventures—Rapt acquired by Microsoft and Krux by Salesforce—highlight a maturing martech landscape ripe for agentic innovation. Kana's emphasis on first-party data and custom agents fills gaps left by traditional customer data platforms (CDPs).
Marketers grapple with fragmented data silos that hinder precise targeting and personalization at scale. Privacy regulations and the demise of third-party cookies exacerbate the issue, limiting access to reliable audience insights for mid-market and enterprise consumer brands, retailers, DTC companies, and agencies. Conventional solutions like legacy CDPs fail to adapt dynamically to real-time shifts in consumer behavior or AI-driven search paradigms, resulting in suboptimal campaign performance and lost visibility.
Kana addresses this with an agentic platform that orchestrates custom AI agents tailored to first-party data. These agents handle answer engine optimization (AEO), synthetic data generation for testing, media proposal creation, and seamless campaign management. Unlike rigid CDP incumbents such as Segment or Tealium, which focus on data unification without proactive intelligence, Kana's agents autonomously optimize workflows for outcomes like retention and acquisition.
As Kana emphasizes in its philosophy:
"AI for augmented intelligence, focus on outcomes not tools, trusted data stewardship."
This approach empowers marketers to 'agentify' workflows, turning static data into dynamic growth engines.
Mayfield's lead investment underscores confidence in Kana's vision, given the firm's track record in enterprise AI and data platforms. For serial founders like CEO Tom Chavez, this seed round signals not just growth capital but strategic validation amid AI hype. It positions Kana to capture share in a martech space evolving toward autonomous agents.
The martech sector targets consumer-tech firms, retailers, and agencies seeking AI augmentation. Recent founder exits to tech giants like Microsoft and Salesforce illustrate investor appetite for data-centric innovations. Trends like AEO and synthetic data generation are fragmenting the market, favoring flexible platforms over monolithic tools.
Serial Founders Fuel Martech Revival
Leadership adds credibility: CEO Tom Chavez co-founded Rapt (acquired by Microsoft) and Krux (acquired by Salesforce), bringing proven exits in data and optimization tech. CTO Vivek Vaidya, CRO Nick Allen, and Head of Engineering Jed Putterman round out a team emphasizing outcome-driven AI. This pedigree positions Kana to navigate complex enterprise sales and deliver on agentic promises.